It was the early 20th century, and America was about to undergo one of its most profound transformational chan-ges: the rise of the automobile. And a company founded in downtown Reading helped it to navigate that turn.

In 1905, two years after an industrialist named Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Co., a pair of Carpenter Steel employees saw the future in automobile frames made from the sturdier heat-treated steel that Carpenter produced.

Taking the name of one of these businessmen, Parish Manufacturing Co. was born in the Reading Railroad machine shops abutting the tracks at Seventh and Chestnut streets.

Such was the success of Neff E. Parish and John E. Sullivan’s enterprise that in 1919, it was acquired by Spicer Manufacturing Co., a maker of transmission components based in South Plainfield, N.J.

Decades later, it would become better known as Dana Corp. And the Reading-based operation, known variously through the years as Parish Pressed Steel, the Parish Frame Division, the Parish Vehicular Structures Division and the Parish Structural Products Division, grew with it.

After World War I, pressed for space, Parish relocated to open space in northwest Reading and built a vast factory where it initially produced truck chassis.

There it stayed, expanding through the years both in space — ultimately four mammoth production facilities were running — and in product capabilities, making truck and auto parts and, during wartime, everything from field kitchens to bombs to gun carriages.

Work had its ups and downs, slowing down during changeovers, when new-model products were rolled in. There were occasional strikes and layoffs. But generally it was steady work, and hard work.

Incentive work, or piece rate, drove the production line, meaning extra pay for producing over and above the rate for the job. That meant new workers had to scramble to get up to speed.

"When things were slowing up in one area, the guys were hollering at the other," said Carl Ramich of Muhlenberg Township, a 34-year employee and president of the Dana-Parish Retirees Group. "You would either produce or the men would make it hard on you so you’d transfer out."

Some workers remember Charles Dana, for whom the company was named, coming to visit the plant from time to time.

"He would just walk through by himself," recalled Richard Whitehead of Spring Township, a 37-year employee. "We used to joke about it: He had the same black suit on every time he went through."

The plant, originally an old-line industrial facility, gradually converted into more high-tech work, utilizing robotic machinery for some functions.

It also served as a research-and-development center for Dana, developing technologies such as hydroforming, in which a steel tube is converted into a frame rail by pumping water into it in a mold at high pressure.

After so many years of activity and employment, many were dumbstruck when Dana closed the plant in September 2000.

The company said it had to close due to customers who wanted suppliers to be closer to vehicle-assembly plants, in order to reduce the expense related to transporting such heavy materials.

Some workers, however, said it had more to do with labor costs, union wages being more expensive than comparable costs at newer plants in the South or offshore — which local workers countered by noting that their work was faster, better and ultimately cheaper than that done at other, newer plants.

And some even said the theft of millions of dollars worth of scrap by Reading Industrial Scrap Co. in the 1980s and ’90s reduced profit margins and led to the shutdown.

Its epitaph? It may be summarized most concisely by Greg Stark of Pisgah Forest, N.C., former industrial-relations manager for the plant and the Parish division: